[00:00:00] Welcome to Unpacking the Digital Shelf B2B Edition, the podcast for the practitioners navigating complex data, massive catalogs, and the shifting expectations of the modern business buyer. Every month we sit down with the leaders who are moving past the hype and building digital shelves that actually scale.
[00:00:28] Jamie Clapper here, and welcome to another episode of Unpacking the Digital Shelf B2B Edition. Today we're joined by a true pioneer in the digital space, Steven Javor, Head of Digital Shelf B2B Edition,
[00:00:39] Digital Customer Experience and Channel Digital Commerce Canada at Schneider Electric. Steven has been shaping the digital landscape for over 30 years. From the early days of webcasts in the 90s to pioneering B2B e-commerce across Europe, the US, and Canada, he has seen every major shift in tech firsthand. In this episode, Steven takes us to the absolute cutting edge of digital marketing, generative engine optimization, or GEO.
[00:01:04] We dive into what it actually takes to make your products visible to AI models, why 90% of your AI citations are coming from sources outside your website, and why the biggest challenge in AI isn't the technology, it's change management and human trust. Whether you're trying to optimize for LLMs, lead an enterprise AI transformation, or understand how Gen Z and millennial buying habits are reshaping B2B, this episode has it all, so let's get to unpacking.
[00:01:33] Hey, Steven. We are so excited to have you on the podcast. Welcome. Happy to be here. Thank you. Awesome. Well, we've had some shifting of our calendar, so I'm glad we're finally sitting down to do this. So I think the audience is going to love the information you have to share. I think I'm still laughing about you saying, I don't know if I'm going to be a good fit for this podcast. And I think within the first couple of minutes of chatting with you, I knew it was going to be a hit.
[00:02:01] So let's dive in. Excuse me. You've been in digital since 1995, so roughly 30 years experience in the industry, B2B since 2000. You've been across Europe, the U.S., and now most recently Toronto. What's the biggest shift in organizations of convincing organizations why digital matters from the early days to now? Yeah, I guess you can say that I'm OG when it comes to digital.
[00:02:31] So, yeah, you know, it's been an interesting career. I would say that, you know, in the beginning, you know, the argument was kind of, you know, sort of it has inverted now. Back in the 90s, 2000s, you kind of had to prove that digital was real. You know, you need to invest in a website. You need to, you know, participate online. Today, nobody disputes that.
[00:02:57] So the hard part is proving that their assumptions about digital are kind of now out of date. Before, it was like, you know, should we invest in digital? Should we invest in a website, you know? And you won that with doing pilots and, you know, getting a champion. Now it's like, well, we've already invested. Why isn't it enough? You know, so, you know, you had to sort of show them that the channel has kind of moved underneath them.
[00:03:22] You know, you know, that a funded e-commerce site plus a mature SEO, you know, strategy can still be invisible. Where we're now discovering, you know, where that discovery is now happening with these AI agents. So, you know, it's always moving. As a matter of fact, I teach a course at the University of Toronto. And every time I teach that course, I have to update it because, you know, I wish I was teaching something like, you know, accounting or something like that. Because you can sort of stay within the thing.
[00:03:51] But digital, it's like, okay, now what's new? So, you know, it's always moving. So, you know. It's like the ever-changing, ever-changing moving target that you have to constantly be updating to. A blessing and a curse, right? Exactly. You know, and I guess the one of the constant things that's happened over my career is that you begin to realize that organizations don't really adopt a technology. They kind of adopt a change in customer behavior.
[00:04:20] Usually a couple of years after the customer has changed the way they do things. And I would say now with AI, it's happening even faster, you know, where everyone's going online and I'm still trying to explain to people what GEO is. And so, you know, back in the 90s, I was, you know, arguing to these leaders that customers were now going online. Now I'm telling them that the customers have already left your website.
[00:04:50] Unfortunately, the truth of what's happening with AI. I do think, though, thankfully, you're able to have those conversations and you're having them now because I've heard it from others that I've spoken with in the community, in the B2B space. There's those that are still just at that baseline of why e-commerce matters. And so I think the fact that organizations are paying attention and focusing on that is a huge win. It means that they're heading in that direction, right?
[00:05:19] And they're creating a game plan for it. So in 2013, you joined Schneider Electric and took on e-commerce strategy for Canada, working with a colleague in Germany to prove out the case for digital before eventually training the entire organization, a process that ran through 2018. So roughly five years and no small feat for sure. I know that anyone who is listening is like, holy moly, that's an undertaking.
[00:05:45] What did it take to go from proving out a strategy with a small team to getting an entire company to adopt it again, which is no small feat in this space? Yeah. Yeah. In 2015, after we did this, I was invited to join the global team and sort of break out and introduce e-commerce throughout all the European countries. So luckily, by happenstance, my wife has a German passport. My daughter is wanting to go on an adventure.
[00:06:13] So we moved to Germany in 2015. And that time, the Schneider Electric e-commerce team, you could fit the entire team in an Uber. Right. And it was so small. And we tried to figure out how we're going to break this out to all the different countries. So while I was living in Germany, I didn't really work in Germany. I was working in all these other countries, the UK and Belgium and Netherlands and Poland and the Nordics and Italy and Spain, all these places. And so, you know, we had to first adopt a strategy.
[00:06:40] So my SVP and I, the way we would kick it off is that we would first go and visit the country president and say, hey, you know, digital is a real thing now. You know, we would come with a great, you know, 45 minute presentation talking about the country, about, you know, where they were as far as that country was concerned with digital, how things were changing, talking about Amazon, talking about the change in customer behavior.
[00:07:03] And, you know, try to convince them to, you know, give us one person from the distribution team and one person from the marketing team, maybe a younger person who's sort of been a digital native. And, you know, and start the conversation there. And, you know, it was really kind of funny because you began to see the differences between Northern Europe, where they were like, you know, kind of skeptical, but then bought into it. And Southern Europe, where they were like, oh, yeah, you know, really into it, but then wouldn't do anything.
[00:07:30] And I always remember the conversation we had with the Italian president, which was, you know, a story. So we went there, we did this hour long presentation. And he was old. He was OG. You know, he was an older guy. For an hour, he lectured us about why no electrician in Italy would ever think about going online. It's not going to happen. They want to go and talk to a person. They know what they're doing. They're not going online. And we were like, oh, my God, we just wasted an entire trip here. And there's no way it's going to go.
[00:07:59] And after about 45 minutes of him lecturing us, oh, it's not going to work. He sat there and said, you know what? We'll give it a try. What a chain. What a quick change. And it ended up being really successful. So the way we kicked it off, we would start with that. Then we would just try to do like a small team proof. No mandate. You know, pick some sort of narrow, measurable slice.
[00:08:24] Prove it with numbers that finance already trusts and, you know, borrow credibility across regions. Hey, look, it's worked in Germany. It should work here in Italy, which lands differently than just, you know, trust me. I know what I'm doing. And then, you know, once we would run that pilot, we would then need to find a champion. We need to have a senior leader that would adopt it as their story, as their success. You know, and that's where that executive sort of cheerleader sort of fits in.
[00:08:53] Because you need somebody on the executive team, especially when you're trying to induce a new technology to champion it for you. To sort of remove some of the roadblocks or some of the naysayers that don't really want to, you know, move forward with the pilot and then into the transition into the other aspects that you need to do. And you also have to understand about how to talk to C-level people. Right? And C-level people, they're really only concerned about what they're measured on. Right? Is it going to improve my margin?
[00:09:22] Is it going to improve my customer satisfaction? Is it going to improve my share price? Right? And you have to sort of really couch your discussions and your arguments on showing them how it was going to improve them to really get them to go on, get on board. But once we got through that and we would do these pilots, usually we would go to a distributor and say, hey, let's try a campaign. Let's pick a product. We'll try a campaign. We'll create some content. We'll push it out there.
[00:09:50] We'll, you know, we'll measure the impact over it. And, you know, and it would move the needle. And then once we got past that, then you realize, oh, they want more. And now we got back into, well, we now have to move from campaigns to really updating their catalog, which means giving them all of our products with the right product information, with the right images and short descriptions and long descriptions and keywords. But even we weren't ready for that.
[00:10:17] So part of that transformation was then going back into our internal organization. We actually created an entire division, which we called Factory C, Factory Content, which was responsible for, you know, for, you know, going through our entire catalog, which was, you know, 60,000 products, trying to figure out what the high runners were.
[00:10:35] And let's fix those first and then figure out a way to get them over to the distributor so they could implement it so that the content was consistent and the same and then build from there, you know. So train the organization, that took a long time. That took, you know, the majority of our time to, you know, get everybody walking in the same direction, being able to sort of, you know, drink the Kool-Aid, but then proving it with numbers.
[00:11:02] You know, so, you know, really the strategy scales at a speed when you can make it sort of someone else's job description. So that was really the key, you know, it's not really the speed that you build it, but getting them to buy into it and then take it on as their own. Absolutely. And I think that still reigns true for anything that you're doing in a digital side of the business, right? I mean, AI is obviously the hot topic.
[00:11:30] And yes, we will get there because what podcast wouldn't be complete right now if we didn't talk about AI and what's happening in that space? But even I think the thought process that you had to go to the top, get that buy-in, build it, and then be able to bring it down from there, build out the teams. I mean, if you would go back and maybe you've had these conversations, how are these leaders reacting to, you know, that was 2018.
[00:11:56] So that was roughly eight years ago that, you know, you felt accomplished and that you built it out. Have you had conversations with them since? Are they grateful for the push and the nudge to focus on digital? Because obviously, I'm sure no one saw digital growing at the rate that it has and all the changes that have happened. Yeah. And I mean, the pandemic really changed things as well, right?
[00:12:22] Because, you know, it came from us trying to call them to them calling us saying, oh, my God, you know, we have to change all so many things to be more relevant online because everyone's being forced to go online. So that really was, you know, a big, you know, accelerator for everyone sort of buying into it. So they bought into it now. But, you know, it's still a challenge for them to, you know, I mean, the e-commerce team went from all of us into an Uber.
[00:12:47] Now there's literally hundreds of people across the globe in the 130 countries or so that we work in that are all getting into it in one form or another. But it does start with governance, right? You need that champion at the top that believes in the story, that believes in the outlook of where things are going. And you can prove that with numbers. Now, like I said, not so much. If I go back to the now, they all have teams.
[00:13:15] They all are working to go forward with it. But I think, you know, AI is that next level. So when it came to the AI discussion, I'm also one of the innovation leaders globally with Schneider on the AI and marketing topic. And about a year and a half ago, I said, you know what? I'm using this great little app called ChatGPT, you know, as one of the first users to jump on that. I'm finding it useful. What happens when my customers aren't using it? How or what do I need?
[00:13:43] What needs to be true for our brand to show up in the prompts that they are creating about, you know, about our products and technology? And so I kicked off a GEO pilot, right? And we sat there and said, okay, let's figure out how to, you know, bring this out into the organization.
[00:14:03] Just about three or four of us, I got the team together and we wrote 650 prompts across our top 10 product families, 10 or 12 product families across the customer journey, focused on different segments, you know. And that took about a month and a half because, you know, we didn't write 650 prompts from scratch. We used ChatGPT to figure out what should the prompts be.
[00:14:24] But then I made sure I went to a 30-year vet who had spent 30 years working directly with customers and said, okay, take a look at these prompts. And is this actually the way that a customer would phrase this thing? Yeah, this is right. This is wrong. And we took a month and a half and he went through every single one of those prompts and made sure it was, you know, written in the way that a customer would actually, you know, perhaps, you know, write it into a prompt, you know.
[00:14:50] And then we had to, you know, tag them because what we did learn as well is that when I write a prompt and I give you that same prompt, we both put it in, depending on our location, we may come up with different answers. So it wasn't really the prompt that was important. We had to tag it with what was that prompt about? Was it about, you know, pricing? Was it about, you know, installation? Was it about, you know, services or support?
[00:15:16] Because what you end up getting is you get the, you get, you know, basically, you know, what is that prompt basically saying, telling you? Like, what is the, what is the feeling coming back from that prompt? So one of the things we found out was that, you know, one of our product sets was expensive or at least the AI was coming back and saying that, you know, great product from Schneider, but a little bit more expensive than everybody else. And then we went there and said, well, why, where is that coming from?
[00:15:42] Well, it was coming from this one article from this one blog, you know, that was, you know, wasn't really very accurate when describing our product because our product had a longer lifespan and had all these other sort of add-ons. So it may have been expensive at first, but it had a longer lifetime value.
[00:15:59] And we were able to go back into that particular entity and update their content and notice that there was a change, right, in the citation and recommendation of that particular product. So you begin to see that, you know, that there are things that you can do with when it comes to improving your citation recommendations when it comes to AI.
[00:16:25] And then now having to convince, you know, the leadership about that wasn't that hard. You know, we kicked this thing off and then within about two months, it got in front of our seat, our global CEO as this is an important topic we need to tackle. Yeah, I think that's great. I think it's showing instead of where a lot of organizations are said, you know, go do AI. That's what everyone hears.
[00:16:50] And I think they get nervous and they don't have that plan in place or they don't have the roadmap. You went ahead, you built a team, you got buy-in at the top. Like you did things in the right order. And I think that's what a lot of our listeners need to hear is this is how you truly go do AI. And this is how you start to dip the toe in the water, be able to get that buy-in.
[00:17:14] Because I think there's this fear, maybe not fear, but misunderstanding of why aren't we participating more in AI, even if the organization is still struggling with data and content, which that's king and queen right there. We all know that. But this is a way that they're able to build out a reasonable way of participating in the AI space. And I think that's great that you were able to do that. And I love your stance on governance.
[00:17:42] And I know even in previous conversations, we've talked a ton about that. And I always give you praise for that because I think it's so valuable. Because if you don't have that buy-in and you don't have that governance, you don't have those legs to stand on and continue to test in that space. So you've said the first step in GEO is making sure your website is even visible to LLMs. This is where we continue to talk about AI and all the great things and pain-in-the-butt things it's doing out there in our space.
[00:18:09] And that roughly half of most company websites aren't. What does invisible to an LLM actually look like? And what are the steps that companies should take to start fixing it to be able to get ahead of this curve as much as possible? Yeah, it's really interesting. And so what we learned from our pilot was that there's sort of like, we call them like the three gates that you need to review. And there is your content fetchable. Is it chosen by the AI?
[00:18:40] And is it extractable? So fetchable means can they actually see your site? Can the AI engines actually go through and see the content that you actually have? And, you know, and there's lots of reasons. And this is usually the biggest blocking point is that you're not, you haven't enabled your site for chat GPT bot or the cloud bot. You can start with your robots.txt file and making sure you're not blocking those bots from coming in.
[00:19:08] But then we learned that, you know, we had designed our site to be client side instead of server side. So with JavaScript. So, you know, to make it faster, you would create a JavaScript so that when someone clicked on the page, it would automatically build the page. But guess what? You know, chat GPT doesn't read JavaScript. Cloud doesn't read JavaScript. Gemini does for some strange reason. Maybe because Gemini is, you know, the CEO goddess of the world. But, you know, those, they don't.
[00:19:35] So we found out that half of our site wasn't even visible. You know, where is your content behind a form or a login? You know, PDFs also not readable by most of the engine. So the first thing you need to do is to figure out, you know, is your site accessible to these agents? And, you know, and you work through that. And when you've gone, you know, through that, at least that first gate, then the second gate is really now that they can see it.
[00:20:05] Is it going to choose your content? Is your content written in a way that it actually provides the answer that the prompt is looking for? Right? Hey, Stephen, let me jump in here quickly. When you say once they know that their site is visible, like how are they doing that? Like what's like almost a quick like how do they jump in and do a check on that? Ask your favorite answer engine.
[00:20:31] Write a prompt that's up there and says, review every single page of my entire site and tell me whether you can see it or not and give me a report. You know, write me a prompt about how I can determine whether my site is being visible to you or not. I mean, that's kind of been the evolution of writing prompts. I hardly ever write prompts anymore. I basically write what is the outcome I'm looking for. And I ask the answer engine to write the prompt for me.
[00:21:00] And then I let the then I run that prompt and it'll tell you what it can see and what it can see. That's a really good sort of first step without actually having to go write 650 prompts and then get your feedback, which is the way we did it in the first place. Just ask it if it can see your your content or not. And it'll give you at least, you know, a first perspective of it. Yeah. Almost like a baseline. OK, please continue. I love this. Right. Then after you get through that point, I mean, probably some of your site will be reachable.
[00:21:29] Maybe some of it won't be. But then you have to take a look at, OK, how is my content written? And what AI tends to like. It likes content that's written by people, but maybe influenced by AI. It does not like AI slop. AI will recognize AI. So it's looking for facts. It's looking for things that it can cite. It's looking that it's going to answer that question.
[00:21:51] So what we found really works well and what's really that the AI engines love are FAQ pages, you know, that talk about what is this product? Who uses it? What are the examples of it being used successfully? And you need to give it, you know, real data and real examples for it to use.
[00:22:15] You know, saying that it's the best or the most affordable or, you know, the sort of typical marketing speak isn't going to be attractive to an AI LLM. It wants to actually be able to grab things, which then leads to the third gate, which is, is it extractable content?
[00:22:34] So not only do you have to write content, but you have to write content in a way that the AI engine can pick up a paragraph or a few sentences and then use that to generate its answer back to the user who's written a prompt. And so we learned these three things. Yeah. One, is your site reachable and can they actually see it?
[00:23:01] Two, is your content, you know, formatted in such a way that it's, it's, it answers the question and it looks like it, you know, you follow the EAT principle. It's got to be, you know, something that is showing it's written by someone who has got expertise and experience and is authoritative and trustworthy. It loves all that stuff. It also loves recency. If it's something new, that'll get picked up by AI very quickly.
[00:23:29] But the third thing that was really interesting was that 80% of our citations we found out came from sites and domains beyond our control. Right. So AI kind of loves to get content from those entities that are not biased. Right. So it likes to go to Reddit. It likes to go to review sites.
[00:23:51] It likes to go to trade magazines, you know, people and places where it doesn't believe that is a biased answer because it wants to get that, that, that, that, that perspective that this is a, you know, a real thing. So you look at that, it's got to be readable. It's got to be written the right way. And you've got to publish it in places where you don't typically have a lot of authority and you have to convince your, your, your marketing team to get there.
[00:24:19] And when you take all of this together, you begin to realize that GEO isn't a technology problem. It's a change management problem. Right. You have the people. You just have to change how they're programming the website, how they're writing the content and where they're publishing the content. Right. And it's those things that are actually a bigger change. I wish I would just say, you know, just implement these MCPs and you're good. No, it's actually teaching your people that they have to do things differently to succeed in GEO.
[00:24:48] Yeah, I think that's great. And I, and I think that draws a good point because I think a lot of the content teams have always done things a certain way. And this is such a shift. It is forcing them to kind of go against what they've been trained in a way. And I think there is a fine line and, and maybe correct me if I'm wrong on this, of balancing how you're writing your content.
[00:25:11] Because while FAQ style information is great for LLMs, is it great for the everyday shopper? Is it exactly what they're looking for? It's like, it's like the balancing. I used to call it the balancing when I was in home improvement between the DIY or the weekend warrior and the true contractor. It was like, you wanted to provide enough information for both of them, but you didn't want to offend the true trained professional that did this for a living. And it's how do you balance that?
[00:25:40] And so what, I guess, what recommendations would you give for a content team? You know, is that, is that proper training? Is that testing and learning? You know, everyone assumes that you can just use AI to write your content. And I think there maybe is a level of that. But I think it's mainly because it's an efficiency thing. And that's where everyone always thinks about AI first is how is this going to create efficiency? But it might not always be the right answer.
[00:26:08] So any recommendations for our content listeners out there? Yeah. I mean, you want to fix sort of in this order. You want to sort of audit your robots, TXT tagging, your gated content. Make sure that, you know, like I said before, that your site is visible. Maybe put an HTML gateway page in front of every critical PDF with your top specs in the front. So it's easy to be grabbed, fix your titles and your schema. And then only then rewrite content. So you want to diagnose before you prescribe.
[00:26:38] You know, half the fixes are really just subtracting things, you know. So AI can't really recommend what it can't read. And it can't read a PDF behind a form. So, you know, start with making sure it's visible. And then, you know, fix the basics before you jump into rewriting all of your content. Because I believe in the future, you know, the future is maybe now, is that when you now design a web page or you're designing a new section or you're introducing a new product. Before it was, you know, what's the unique selling proposition?
[00:27:07] How do I build the case and write the great images and put in the right tables? Now it's like you write prompts. Like, what is the prompt I want this page to be the answer for? And then you see who's winning that prompt right now. What kind of content it's looking for. And then you kind of work backwards from that and say, okay, what do I need to win the prompt that's really going to create this page? And I agree with you.
[00:27:32] It's sort of like now we're, I'm beginning to lean towards the fact that you're going to be designing, you know, two different experiences. You're going to be designing the human experience for the people that are going to go to the page who maybe want to see some of the images and see the validation of your product. But then you're also going to have this, you know, this agent version, which has got all of the facts, all of the FAQs, all of the support information.
[00:27:58] You know, because what we are recognizing now is that there are less, the traffic to websites are going down. Your conversion rate may be rising, may be continuing. You're not losing business, but you're losing traffic. And so maybe measuring web traffic is not going to be as important in the future as it has been today as a key KPI. Absolutely. No, that makes complete sense. And it's one of those things that's funny. In my experience, in my role, it's like a love-hate relationship with AI.
[00:28:27] There's times I'm like, I don't want to hear about it anymore. I don't want to talk about it anymore. And then ironically, there I am at night Googling something, which essentially becomes me on AI or me on ChatGPT asking them. Google Lens taking a picture. Like all the things that I'm doing, you know, that essentially are backed up by AI. So let's talk about governance because it's one of my favorite things that we talk about.
[00:28:55] And I think you do it so well that I think this is valuable to our listeners. But you've pointed to governance, an executive cheerleader, and one source of truth as prerequisites for AI success. Plus, obviously, training the whole organization to use it. Kudos to you. But drawing on the Schneider playbook, what does that AI governance and enablement effort actually look like from a day-to-day perspective?
[00:29:20] Just to give our listeners kind of a thought on how often, you know, because again, we talked about this at the beginning. It's shifting all the time. So what does that look like for them? Yeah, it's a combination of things. I mean, really, you know, you have to find a leader that, you know, is willing to, you know, embrace the future. And I don't think like as we're using it, our leaders are using it as well, typically. You know, so it's not hard.
[00:29:47] Like I said, it's not hard to get their attention once you start doing some pilots and explaining to them that you've written some prompts and here's what's come back from it. And we should figure out how to do something about it. You know, and so you want to find someone that's, you know, at a certain, you know, executive position that is going to, you know, back you up on that. It is willing to, you know, sponsor, you know, you going forward.
[00:30:12] And then when the governance, as you start to go through your pilot and you start updating them about what you're finding and what you're learning, you then set up a sort of a regular cadence to find out where we are. And this is where, you know, working with a partner works really well. There is a bunch of them out there that can help you figure out where you stand versus your competition. You know, where you're being cited, where you're being recommended. What is the sentiment that's actually happening? It's one thing to actually get cited, but, you know, are you being cited positively or negatively?
[00:30:42] You know, you want to be able to sort of figure that out. But, and then when you get to that, the governance will start building in. You know, you understand that you're going to build a strategy from that. You're going to work with your leadership to understand that they are going to support that strategy or the strategy is in line with their strategy. You know, and then you'll get into sort of an operating sort of rhythm because, you know, what we're finding is that this is kind of a loop. You're going to set up these prompts.
[00:31:11] You're going to tag them. You're going to then measure them. You're then going to learn from that measurement. You're going to then update content or work with third parties to, you know, get their content aligned with your voice and then see that, you know, that citation rate go up. But then the next week you're going to do it again or the next month or the next quarter, right? Because it's constantly changing.
[00:31:34] And this is the big change that we're seeing in marketing is that, you know, and especially in product marketing is that you're going to need to write these prompts and measure them on a periodic basis. And we started off by, you know, writing these prompts for Canada and the United States. But, you know, depending on what the prompts about, you know, buying one of our products in Toronto is going to be different than buying that product in San Diego.
[00:32:01] So you need to have this sort of localized as well, at least a version of this localized, depending if you're, you know, what you're trying to do, especially if you're trying to improve your conversion rates. So, you know, you set up your topics and prompts, you measure your visibility, your diagnosis, your gaps, you try to fix what you can, you then remeasure, you know, and this is sort of owned by that cross-functional group. And you'll see that this is the way that I think marketing teams are going to start working in the future is that they're going to understand how relevant are we with these agents and these prompts.
[00:32:32] Because it's moving out of being, you know, a lot of times what companies will do is, well, we already have an SEO guy. We'll just give the SEO guy the GEO. But this is much broader than that, right? This is involving your sales teams, your marketing teams, your service teams. All of them have a responsibility to getting, you know, content out there and having those reviews out there. And, you know, and there are certain things that you can fix, you know, and you'll find out, yeah, this is an issue because it's, you know,
[00:33:00] we're getting some negative reviews from this particular, you know, Reddit file or third-party, you know, website. But if you start seeing negative things that are going across many sites, then maybe you have a reality problem. Maybe your product does need to be redone because you can't just go out and just tell them to fix their reviews, right?
[00:33:26] So it really isn't, you know, governance isn't really a policy document. It's who's allowed to describe the product and where that description lives. And it becomes almost everyone's responsibility. So, you know, teaching in Schneider, we're not teaching GEO just to the marketers. We're teaching about GEO to everybody who's involved. I love that. I feel like there's like three good takeaways. Like the proof is in the pudding when you're doing this and sharing those metrics and the results.
[00:33:57] Two, you can't just throw this on one person's shoulders and you can't have them being the only one responsible. And three, it's everyone in the organization that's going to make it work. I agree with that wholeheartedly. So for any of our leaders that are listening here, take that into account because nine times out of ten, as we said at the start, those teams are small, but mighty. They're lean.
[00:34:20] And so we want to make sure that if you want to really, I think, give it the manpower that it deserves, it's that cross-functional alignment that helps support. No one has ever done anything great in a silo, right? So it's incorporating those teams.
[00:34:35] Okay, one final question for our listeners because when we connected, I love the fact that you teach e-commerce at the University of Toronto because I know when I was in college, which, you know, was just not that long ago, I did not have the ability to learn anything in e-commerce. So I love that you are out there helping the next generations learn this.
[00:34:56] So, you know, I think you have done a bit of study that shows how Gen Z and millennials buy, including that they don't trust branded messages without third-party validation. What are the most surprising findings from that research? And what should B2B marketers be doing differently because of it? Yeah, it's kind of funny because I believe that, you know, most of the people that are working in these, you know, these frontier AI models actually come from the Gen Z millennial generation.
[00:35:26] So for some reason, their instinct is to, you know, distrust the brand, you know, check their peers, you know, read reviews and independent sources. It's literally encoded about how AI engines work, you know. And as I mentioned before, about 80% of our citations came from these third-party sources. And AI looks for consensus across all these sort of independent domains before treating a claim as a fact. And the young buyer, you know, does the same thing. So it's kind of converged with AI.
[00:35:57] So what B2B marketers should do differently is maybe treat the channel and review our ecosystem as citation infrastructure, not as a sales afterthought. But you really have to sort of give your partners sort of factual content kits instead of like marketing copy and make name customers with, you know, quantified outcomes, whether your most valuable assets, because that's what they like going.
[00:36:22] They want to see third-party unbiased reviews as a marker that this is, you know, a product that they can trust. So, you know, my daughter's Gen Z, you know, and I ask her, you know, how does she decide? And she goes, yeah, I'll go to a brand just to see whether they have it, see what their, you know, what their, you know, their selling proposition.
[00:36:49] And she wasn't going to use those words, but, you know, tell me that it's going to do what I need it to do. But then, you know, I will go to and ask my friends. Then I will go and ask third-party. I won't make a decision just based on what the brand is saying. And, you know, AI is kind of the same thing. It's not going to trust your branded copy. It's going to trust what others are saying about your brand or about your product, right? So, you know, the answer to they don't trust isn't really better brand messaging.
[00:37:19] It's sort of really kind of being boringly, consistently factual everywhere that you can't control the message. That's fair. No, I love that. And I'm notorious for searching things on TikTok. Like, it's gospel too, which I always said I would never do. But here we are. So funny thing is that, you know, she also said, I don't trust influencers, right? Because influencers are being paid sometimes to, you know, so it's they're being really selective about who they trust and who they don't trust.
[00:37:49] I love that. I think it's interesting. And I think it will be, especially within, you know, your line of industry that you're in and different verticals. I'll be curious to see how this continues to evolve based on, you know, just what has typically been the shopping behavior, I would say, within the industrials and home improvement side of the business. And that's something that I'm kind of wildly watching because I'm curious to see how it plays out.
[00:38:16] Because I think to your point, there is this assumption that shopping behaviors won't change. But we know that demographically younger generations are shopping differently. And so I think that's going to play tremendously into how organizations continue to evolve in the digital space. And it's evolving so fast. Like I said before, you know, companies tend to adopt the new customer journeys, usually a couple of years after. I mean, this is happening so quickly right now.
[00:38:45] I mean, I just started playing around with Muse, the new meta, you know, program, which allows you to buy things online. It actually functions as you. If you're willing to give it access to your credit card, you can start actually buying things for you. You know, I'm at that point where I'm not sure if I trust it or not, but I do remember the late 90s where I built my first e-commerce website and I couldn't convince customers to put their credit card online.
[00:39:11] You know, now you're going to be giving your credit card to an AI agent, right, that may make the purchase. Then how do you measure that as a brand, right? Because it's not, you're not actually selling to a person, you're now selling to an agent. And, you know, and that's the business model for all these frontier companies, right, is that they want to be able to actually not only create the relationship with the prompter that this is the best product to buy, but then buy it for them. Absolutely.
[00:39:37] Well, Stephen, I think you just gave us the next topic for when I have you back on. We'll expect a full report on how Muse is working and if your credit card was stolen or not, as well as how you were able to track those purchases. But always great connecting. Thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with me. I know I thoroughly enjoyed the conversation and I think there's a lot of great takeaways for our listeners. Great. That's a help.
[00:40:06] Thanks for tuning in to unpacking the Digital Shelf B2B edition. To keep learning from the best in B2B, subscribe now and join our community of leaders by becoming a member of the Digital Shelf Institute. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.